Reviews

So we have manipulative narcissistic psychopath Ingrid played by Aubrey Plaza stalking and gaining trust of some vapid, gullible and conceited valley girl instagram influencer. In the beginning the things have been working fine for her. She even managed to use her dufus Batman loving landlord by seducing him into believing that he is her boyfriend. Then it all failed due to cunning brother of the influencer woman who gains access to Ingrid's phone, uncovers her stalking and lies and then tries to blackmail her into paying him for keeping his mouth shut. It all ends up in a disaster with landlord in a hospital (having barely survived being beaten by the influencer's brother). After that Ingrid had the audacity to keep calling/texting the influencer who naturally ghosted her (why she did not report her to police is rather unclear). Ingrid decided to off herself having made a last video post on Instagram where she came clean so to say. She wakes up in a hospital with landlord dude circling around in a wheelchair (I assume he is paralyzed from waist down). And of course he video has become viral and she was saved by that landlord who contacted police upon seeing the farewell video.

So.... What have we learned? I dunno. That people are idiots and that you can get a lot of likes if you announce that you gonna kill yourself on Instagram? Like literally ....

Some questions: would you give your truck that has a gun (later we learn it is a paintball gun) and cocaine in glove compartment to a tenant (even if you are infatuated with that tenant)? Would you continue to have good relationship with that tenant if she returns the truck the next day sideswiped agains the guard rail even tho you agreed that you needed the truck back, presumably whole, by the 6 pm of previous day? Would you be so dumb if a girl f*ed you just so that she could manipulate you into pretending to be her BF at a party?

Would you report to police if your brother is kidnapped, driven to a desert and knocked out cold?

Would you report to police if you discovered that some narcissistic psychopath is stalking you?

So, altho I kind of like Aubrey Plaza acting, the movie did not work for me. A dumb movie. Especially the happy ending made it super cheesy.

Well, I have never seen this movie as a kid. Watched it recently with my son thinking it would be similar to Bueller's day off or Breakfast club.

Well.... this is really garbage.

First of all, it follows kind of similar schematic as "Weird science". There's shower scene (this time with gratuitous frontal nudity), a wild party that all but destroys the hosting house, then a night ride through Chicago...

Second - it features your stereotypical brat brother, idiotic grandparents, stupid self absorbed older sister who is about to marry some blubbering idiot whom they refer to as "bohunk" which is ethnic slur for Central European immigrants. A family that forgets that the heroine has a birthday. So she is pissed....

Third - totally out of nowhere racism - over the top idiotic portrayal of a Chinese exchange student.

Fourth - Sam takes off her panties and gives them to a dork so that he can use them as a proof that he "scored". LIKE WHAT? Yikes.

And then a cherry on top of the cake - the romantic hero of the movie passes his semi-conscious drunk GF on to an underage geek (the same one that scores panties) so he can have his way with her in hero's daddy's Rolls-Royce. I kid you not !!

This is seriously disturbing movie if you think about it.

The movie is great. An aging gangster, Johnny Hallyday, arrives in dreary November to a French village with a goal of robbing a local bank. By chance he ends up staying at dilapidated, stuffed choke full with antique furniture, house of retired literature teacher, Jean Rochefort. They develop a strange affection for each other that can be summed up in "grass is always greener on the other side". The gangster longs for stable, uneventful, leisurely and "settled" lifestyle of the teacher. Meanwhile the teacher longs for adventurous and adrenaline fueled life of the gangster.

Beautiful, brooding cinematography, strong character, two-hander, play. Conversations about aging, decline of masculinity and general futility of life and cosmos. Almost like old men grumbling, but they do make good points. Chekhov kind of quality. The two characters are almost moving in opposite time directions. An old teacher gets invigorated while gangster gets less and less enthusiastic and brooding and "older".

This goes on for 4 days in a run up for big day Saturday when the teacher is scheduled for triple bypass surgery and the gangster is supposed to rob the bank with 3 other accomplices.

Rather predictably the teacher dies while being operated and the robbery goes south - somebody tipped the police and the gangster is shot by the SWAT team. Both are dead at the same time. I would think that would be the end of it. BUT...... Both seem to open their eyes and the next frame we see the gangster seem to be leaving prison, teacher throws his keys to him, gets on the train and is gone, while the gangster takes the teacher's place in the old house by the grand piano. The "trading places" completed.

That did not make much sense to me.... I would think if this is what happened - both survived and the gangster got a jail time, he would be there for a very long time. Whereas they did not seem much changed in this key exchange sequence. So, I guess, it is open to interpretation as to what really happed with usual cop-out - it was all just a dream.... So, beautiful move. Felt a little betrayed by the ending.

Frankly I am absolutely dumbfounded by glowing reviews this movie got.

To me it was overly long, pretentious, trivialized, insulting to physics snoozefest.

So we have humanity on Earth on a brink of ecological catastrophe due to supposed food crisis that is exacerbated by some "blight" consuming oxygen. So whoever did not starve will suffocate. We see perfectly healthy, green corn crops being pounded by some dust storms to emphasize this idea.

We have our hero, McConaughey a farmer, who has two children, somehow deciphering that bands of sand in some abandoned library represent binary encoded coordinates! (how he come up with that idea is anybody's guess). So he drives his truck on the location with his daughter in tow and discovers brightest minds of humanity working on a clever "save humanity" plans to bring a bunch of frozen fertilized eggs to some wormhole that appeared somewhere in the vicinity of Saturn. Why? Who knows, there might be inhabitable planet on the other end of the wormhole. Anne Hathaway plays a nerdy scientist. A daughter of a genius behind the affair played by Michael Caine who has a couple of blackboards filled with gibberish equations pulled from general theory of relativity. So, our farmer, who just randomly discovered this, is somehow crucial to the plan and they want him to pilot a spaceship to the wormhole to establish contact with missions sent there previously. McConaughey believe that's the goal, but apparently he is deceived, and the real goal is to deliver the eggs to a fitting planet to continue humanity with Earth population left to die (or something like that).

So he parts with his family, his brat daughter gives him hard time, but off he goes to space the next day. So far the movie is kind of OK. But then nonsense starts. Once they dive into wormhole and arrive to some system where you have a planet and what appears to be a blackhole nearby, They are orbiting that planet and they need to go on the surface. And here we learn that if they land in that planet where gravity is just 30% stronger than on Earth each hour spent on the surface would be equal 7 Earth years. WHAT!? As one of the fellas zings "That's relativity for you"..... That kind of difference could have been caused by gravity force that sure would have shredded them to pieces due to tidal forces without even landing on the planet. OK, fine. So they land in the weirdly shallow ocean and see the previous mission floating face down in the water. How? You go through a wormhole, you land on random planet, random place and you smack get to the position of the previous expedition. Then some huge (like a mile high) wave is about to hit them (where is all this water coming from on a shallow ocean is yet another guess) so they have to get out in a jiffy, but before doing so of course, for dramatic effect, Hathaway gets stuck and save by some ridiculous looking robot in the last moment. So off they go back to the orbit where 23 years has passed. And are greeted by their aging colleague who was left behind on the orbit who diligently waited for knock on the hatch all these years. And then, check it out, on the other end of that wormhole they get reception from Earth and read the messages that have accumulated over 23 years!

After that follows more nonsense of visiting another post, where they are cheated by Matt Damon character. With mandatory fight between two alfa males. McConaughey gets his helmet visor cracked and does not die almost instantly in the atmosphere saturated by ammonia. Then Damon makes a dash for the mother ship and ends up almost destroying it and then finally McConaughey and Hathaway get int the ship, realize they have no fuel and somehow they decide to fall into a blackhole AND "ingenious" McConaughey utilizes 3rd law of Newton to undock from mothership at some "right moment" so that he falls onto blackhole and Hathaway magically gets a boost to end up on some 3rd planet where the love of her live was left stranded from previous mission. Meanwhile McConaughey instead of being torn to pieces by tidal forces finds himself trapped in some sort of matrix behind that library wall back on Earth! And he proceeds to give clues in Morse code to his daughter who, using these messages, corrects some of the gibberish equations on that black board, yells "Eureka" and humanity is somehow saved after that.

And then we see McConaughey waking up in a hospital (A better plot twist would have been that it was a psychiatric hospital and the whole ordeal was his crazy dream....) some 120 years later and having witnessed his daughter on a deathbed off he goes to the planet where Hathaway is stuck sitting at the pile of stones, a shrine to her apparently dead lover. Mind bending.

NONSENSE like this. And of course you get to listen to cheesy Hollywood music at every critical junction.

It is unbelievable pile of hot garbage with elements of the movie lifted from "Space Odyssey 2001". I am seriously concerned about collective state of mind of the viewer audience who gave this "gem" glowing reviews.

So there is a hippie commune somewhere out there in the Universe and they live, as hippies should, in peace and harmony with Nature. Agrarian society. Communicating with each other by telepathy, attending "silent concerts", and do interplanetary travel in some sort of egg shaped bubbly crafts. For reasons I did not quite get they travel to various planets, Earth included and marvel at silly things the earthlings do - like money, wars, cars, tech. Etc. You know, the evils of civilization. As we learn deeper into the movie Jesus and JS Bach had been also the messengers from that planet. So, I surmise, they sort of monitor Earth and try to influence it of sorts. So, the main protagonist Mila, wants to go to Earth for no other reasons but because her mother was an Earthling. Just to check out on Earth. So she gets into egg-shaped bubbly thing and gingerly travels to modern day Paris. Where of course she discovers a few things that are wrong like air pollution, water pollution, inedible food or food made from animals (strong vegetarian message). In process of communicating with Earthlings she proceeds to screw with them so that they "open their eyes", start hugging trees, ditching their shoes to walk barefoot, discover disgust for meat eating or start throwing stale cookies at the evil cars. You know, the hippie agenda. Then things start to get a bit random, as I think at this point the director ran out of ideas. Since she can't consume inedible processed food she gets herself into maternity ward and grabs a baby who was conceived as the result of a rape of a Bosnian woman by Serbian soldiers. The baby was abandoned and being cared for by a nurse. So holding a baby "charges" Mila somehow. She falls asleep to be awaken by the nurse who like "WTF?". While they are talking the head doctor barges in and starts giving them hard time. So Mila does that mindf* thing on him and he turns into an idiot who realizes that he, as a man, has no idea as what is it to give birth to a child. Mila tugs along with "enlightened" Doc to his apartment. Sleeps on a balcony. He has out of control impudent brat son and a wife who stays with him only because of money. All these revelations are triggered by Mila's trickery. So random stuff like that. Add to this that she communicates with her planet by sitting ankle deep in the water and by holding her hands to her temples and flapping them funny. Now back to the baby. She need the baby, the nurse is conflicted because the baby will be taken away soon by Child Protection Service and she apparently is attached to the baby. So they steal the baby and go to their flat where there is also nurse's sister. Both rather attractive. While there, Mila, ankles in the bathtub communicates to her sons just to say "Hello" and they get a glimpse of two sisters and immediately want to go to Earth to get to know them. They convince their local sage commune leader to send the to Earth and they land in that egg shaped bubbly thingie somewhere in Australia among aborigines who live just like them on their planet in harmony with Nature so they are surprised to contrast that to all the bad rap their mother was giving them about Paris. So sooner or later they take a flight from Australia to Paris pulling similar mindf* on airline and customs personnel. Having arrived to Paris they meet the sisters, the Doc's son who is getting all better without watching TV all day long, they drive cars, have fun at soccer field by getting both teams perform silly ballet and then kiss and hug each other (gay theme). And then they just go back to their planet with the sisters and the baby in tow! And that's it! So how silly does that sound to you? IMO it is pretty silly.

So, enlightened hippies stole 2 hot girls + baby from that stupid planet Earth and everybody is happy. And that is basically it.

I hope that may be a lot was lost in translation and the French dialog must have been witty and full of zingers. I could only hope.

I would not say I totally did not enjoy the movie. But it is a silly movie.

First time I watched Taxi Driver was back in 1987 and it left me fascinated. Just rewatched it with my son (he found it to be an "OK" movie). I still enjoyed it, granted, partially it stirred up some nostalgia.

To the point of the review - great cinematography, camera work, music, ambience. You see the grit of 70s New York thru the eyes of a disturbed taxi driver and feel the alienation of urban society. Granted, there is definite homage to Jean-Luc Godard, but it is lovely made.

Robert De Niro is great portraying a disturbed insomniac descending into madness. I see some reviewers commenting about quality of dialogue... Yes, the dialog is lacking. But it feels so real! It does not sound contrived or forced, or you feel there is a writer behind it who is jumping over his head trying to impress viewers with his intellectual prowess. And .... I should say this was rather typical for the movies in 70s. Characters just talked to each other like you do in real life. Less pathos.

There are some questions about the plot. Indeed Travis does not come across as an idiot. The speech he gives to Betsy to win her over is rather sweet and endearing. So, how could he possibly take her to a porn movie on the first date? (BTW some research shows that the movie was actually a Swedish sex education video!) While Travis' devolvement into a paranoid psychotic is shown very well, that whole assassination plot execution is rather cringe worthy. And the carnage scene at the end is a little over the top - circus like.

To sum up. A canonical Noir movie from the 70s. A movie that cannot be made today. A must watch.

I rewatched the movie recently with my son. I found the movie quite unremarkable. Mostly because it is rather primitive and schematic. There are sadistic guards, crooked boss, camaraderie of fellow prisoners, a almost messianic story of Andy, a wrongly imprisoned former banker who overcomes the adversity and ends up winning the lottery so to say.

And movie slowly goes through the motions of torment, dispair, opportunities, hope and revenge.

And it has that kind of theatrical feel to it and quite slow pacing. Like you already know what Brooks is up to, yet takes forever for him to hang himself. Or it felt that way.

Another cringe worthy scene was when Andy escapes. When he sheds prison attire and spreads his arms lifts his face to the rain. It was almost funny.

Another thing, the life in prison, despite sadistic guard and corrupt boss, looks like some kind of summer camp. Like life there is almost great, just a bit monotonous. No grit. Everyone clean shaven, washed and neatly dressed. You know, like it is a drama play by rich students in college drama club.

I think the movie is popular because viewers get trapped in their indignation at the injustice leveled at Andy, they root for him and get rewarded by the happy ending. So it feels good, satisfying. But to me it was boring and predictable at the same time.

Verbal Kint did not have to talk to the cops at all, right? I mean there wouldn't be a story then but I real life he did not have to. Just wait for his bail to post. I fact he was subjecting himself to risk of being discovered to be lying had the cop connected the dots earlier.

Another fun fact - except the taxi heist and the very first scene of the movie where Keaton got killed - nothing we know that that really happened.

I understand that Hitler is a sensitive topic for Germans, so a German comedy (dark comedy alright) about Hitler waking up in the modern time Germany must be breaking many taboos. A movie that makes you sympathize with supposedly the most evil person ever lived doubly so!

Well, I did not expect much but the movie drew all my attention and I thoroughly enjoyed it. This movie makes you think, makes you laugh, makes you cry and leaves you terrified. Imagine Hitler, his world view justapoxed on modern day PC, self centered, narcissistic culture. The fella who played Hitler did a terrific job. The idea of the movie is that Hitler wakes up in modern day Germany and embarks on a discovery trip while subjecting what he sees through the critical mind of the Fuhrer. Then, having realized the propaganda power of TV, he gets on the live TV show and delivers a speech. OMG, this was the climax of the movie, that whole scene starting from the pregnant silence that sent chill down the spines of the people in the audience, the speach itself, the eloquence if the speaker and the shocked faces of the listeners. Brilliant.

I only had one issue with the movie. To remind us what an evil monster Hitler was the authors of the movie couldn't come with anything better than having Hitler shooting some pup that was attacking his shins. Real Hitler would never have hurt an animal....